Wednesday, February 23, 2011

Palm Overview

In my opinion WebOS is the best mobile operating system around. It features true multi-tasking, tight hardware and software integration, business class email client, excellent battery life, contains a fully integrated gaming suite and is open source. For those of you who do not know about Palm, allow me to introduce them. Palm created the first hand held PDA: The Palm Pilot.

Palm was also the originator of the first modern smartphone the Palm Treo

Even with such a killer operating system Palm faced two serious problems that caused its demise.

Firstly it was locked to one carrier: Sprint(Which is third out of the four major wireless carriers in America). This agreement caused Palm to receive little exposure and lowered its potential market share considerably. While remaining exclusive to one carrier worked well for Apple it did not produce the same results for Palm. This occurred because the company was not well established in the mobile industry. After a year with Sprint Palm was able to begin marketing its goods to other carriers. So now there two carriers for Palm products: Sprint and Verizon. This move to gain additional carrier support was a smart one by Palm however during this move the second major problem of Palm mobile was revealed.

The Palm Pre released on Sprint and the Palm Pre Plus released on Verizon had the exact same hardware!

So even with its fantastic operating system, and the move to Verizon (the nations largest wireless provider) the Palm Pre Plus could not garner enough consumer appeal because it utilized last years hardware, and in a world with the iPhone it just couldn't gain enough profit to maintain. So in April 2010 Palm was acquired by HP. While I was originally against this acquisition and doubted the ability of HP to revitalize Palm I am currently eating my words after seeing the new Palm Pre 3. Make sure you check out my other post that has videos showcasing the new Palm/HP hardware.